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Professional Services

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We look to build a relationship with our clients, therefore we don’t expect you to make anonymous button click configuration choices. We will walk you through every step of the process to ensure you know what is happening when, and why.

If we get it right first time, your business can flourish right from the start, therefore there are no self-setup portals, get in touch and we will be pleased to talk you through the process. On a simple setup, we can have you up and running in minutes, to more complex setups that may take several days to ensure our solution will fully cater your needs.

Once up and running, simply get in touch if you need anything tweaking and we will again run through any changes.

 

SSL For Free

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Managing SSL certificates is painful at times, and costly. With PALSS you are entitled to use SSL for free, just let us know and we can talk you through your options.

One of these options is to use LetsEncypt to protect your traffic. From your side there is nothing to do, we just enable LetsEncrypt and within minutes your traffic will be protected using free SSL certificates, to find out more see https://letsencrypt.org/

One thing to remember is that while implementing SSL may be simple on the front end, we may require additional work to the origin server to ensure all assets are delivered correctly so you don’t end up with mixed content messages, again our team can point you in the right direction there.

DDOS Proection

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Sadly DDOS attacks are becoming more common, and are been used for anything from fun for script kiddies,  to criminal gangs using it to exploit money from your business.

First, we need to understand what DDOS is, originally it was just DOS, DOS stands for Denial Of Service Attack, this was a single machine sending more requests to the server then it could handle, eventually driving it Offline and inaccessible.

However, as computer power has grown, DOS attacks rarely work now, so DDOS become the norm. In this case, it’s a Disrupted Denial Of Service Attack, in short, many machine target a single point and try to flood it, this flood can be request based, hoping to take it down by forcing the attacked machine to run out of resources and therefore unable to answer any more requests.

What we are seeing more of now, however, is DDOS attacks using traffic flooding techniques. In the simplest terms, it uses a compromised group of computers to send either simple types of packets or specially crafted packets in order to use all your available bandwidth. In this case, they don’t need a single request to reach your machine, all they are trying to do is fill up the network pipe that goes to your machine, thus making it very difficult for other people to sustain any meaningful connection. The easiest way to think of this is trying to drink a pint of water in one go, only so much will go into your mouth before it spills over the edges and ends up on the floor. In the case of the internet to packets just time out.

We can offer protection against both types of attacks. Although sadly sometimes as we saw with the DYNDNS attack, there is only so much bandwidth available. http://dyn.com/blog/dyn-statement-on-10212016-ddos-attack/

Improve End User Experience

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Nothing can be worse for the user to wait for a website to load, in fact, most of the time they don’t. Many studies have shown that after around 4 seconds most users will have clicked away and gone elsewhere. In fact, every second saved, all the way down to 10ths of a second will improve your user conversion rate.

“Akamai and Gomez.com in their survey state that almost half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they are likely to abandon a site, which doesn’t get loaded within 3 seconds. 79% of web shoppers having trouble with web site performance won’t return to the site to buy again and more than 44% of these web shoppers would go and tell a friend that what kind of experience they had while shopping online.”

With PALSS we ensure the closest cluster delivers where possible cached data, and if not, uses high speed connections back to your server to fulfil your requirements.

The below was a recent test we carried out to show the load time improvements available using PALSS.

Origin Server Location Cardiff / All Tests Carried out between GTMetrix and Pingdom, worst results for PALSS Quoted

Test Location: Stockholm, Sweeden

Origin Direct: 1.60seconds

Normal Caching: 1.26seconds / 26%  saving

Aggressive Caching: 1.09seconds / 46% saving

Test Location: NYC, USA

Origin Direct: 2.34seconds

Normal Caching: 1.86seconds / 25% saving

Aggressive Caching: 1.06seconds / 120%  saving

Test Location: California, USA

Origin Direct:  3.46seconds

Normal Caching: 2.29seconds / 51% saving

Aggressive Caching: 1.60seconds / 116% saving

Test Location: Melbourne, Australia

Origin Direct: 10.89seconds

Normal Caching: 2.95seconds / 269% saving

Aggressive Caching:  2.69seconds / 300% saving

As you can see the further from the origin server you get, the bigger the decrease in time. Although in all case, the load time savings would make a huge difference to the user base.

Globally Empower Your Business

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Setting up globally synced servers is not for the feint hearted, in fact, we’ve done this for PALSS and other websites, so we speak from experience on this. This is especially true when branching out into new territories for the first time,  you know you have to get your delivery system closer to the new users, otherwise, their experience will not meet your high standards.

However, without moving your servers, or setting up new server farms, PALSS can put you on every continent and closer to your end users. This ensures that page delivery is always made locally, saving a dramatic amount of time, see this page for more details and some real life examples and test. 

 

Global Clustered Locations

Peak Time Traffic Management

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As with everything, life is rarely straightforward, so you set your server up and tested and everything was good, but now marketing has decided that every Monday they will do they mailshot to drive new customers to your site.

Brilliant, the only small issue is when you designed your infrastructure you designed it on a level playing ground. Now marketing wants to double the traffic after each campaign. So you can add extra resources, but sadly for 95% of the year they’ll be do nothing but increase the bottom line, or you can turn to PALSS, because of the advanced caching techniques we use, we can ensure the 90% of traffic is dealt with by us, without ever needing to connect to your servers. Not only do you get all the security benefits from PALSS but out of the box we will save you bandwidth and CPU use, meaning your servers can run leaner and you can invest in failover solutions etc, instead of investing for small blips in traffic.

Now you are covered for growth, and specifically to allow campaigns to run in confidence.

Downtime Avoidance

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Due to the way PALSS is setup we maximize your uptime, not only our all our systems resilient but due to our advanced caching engine we do a lot of the heavy lifting for you, this reduces load on your systems and frees your system to only deal with non-cachable requests.

As we all know, nothing is infallible, so if we do see your systems failing, we can failover to a standby server for you, or we can simply deliver a landing page advising your client’s alternative ways to contact you.

This ensure your clients can always reach you, regardless of transient outages.

 

Normal Operations

 

Failover Situation

 

Increased and Flexible Scalability

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As PALSS was designed from the ground up to be first and foremost a Cloud based Load Balancing system we are not tied to be any provider, in fact, we span multiple providers to ensure maximum reliability and uptime. This is exactly the design we encourage where possible for you to use, multiple providers in divergent locations, this way should anything happen and you are using PALSS you’ll be failing over to your other locations before your competition are even aware they are losing business.

On the back of this, it does mean should you have a big launch coming up, or you’re are expanding your business, you can just bring online additional resources with whichever provider suites your requirements. Then simple let us know how you want them to be included and we will add them in, and away you go. No complex DNS, routing policies, VPN, or MPLS networks to setup, and no requirements to build within your current provider.

Loadbalanced Across locations, providers and servers

 

Single Failure, that service is just removed automatically

 

All of the above is fully automated, and happens without any interaction

WAF – Web Application Firewall

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With more and more complex applications being built, and more and more commercial value coming from an online presence. It’s not surprising more and more sites are being targeted both for data theft, and also hijacking purposes.

Now it’s not enough to simply sit behind a firewall and lock down ports to restrict access, you need to ensure that requests coming to your web server are both legitimate, but also non-destructive.

As such PALSS offers your first line of defense in securing your web application. We offer an always on Web Application Firewall. Just like a normal firewall we look at each request and inspect the contents for common attack vectors, if we detect such an attack then we stop the request on our system. So your application never gets exposed to this risk.

Some of the common exploits we protect against are

SQL Injection (SQLi)
Cross Site Scripting (XSS)
Local File Inclusion (LFI)
Remote File Inclusion (RFI)
Remote Code Execution (RCE)
PHP Code Injection
HTTP Protocol Violations		 HTTPoxy
Shellshock
Session Fixation
Scanner Detection
Metadata/Error Leakages
Project Honey Pot Blacklist
GeoIP Country Blocking

These make up the core OWASP rule set, specially crafted to ensure we block requests the are damaging to your business, without impacting on your users

In addition to this core rule set, we add rules based on attack traffic patterns as they happen. We can offer bespoke services, such as hotlink protection, access restrictions etc, just contact us with your requirements and we will see how we can help you.